Is the Java Cup Half Full or Half Empty?

Software Magazine, Oct, 1998 by Rick Whiting

Time for a reality check. What kinds of benefits are corporate IS managers realizing by implementing Java? And where does the technology still fall short?

You might say that Java is going through a tough adolescence.

Through 1996 and 1997, Java was hailed as the cure for complex software development and the antidote for incompatible computer systems. Java backers, Sun Microsystems in particular, even touted it as the key that would free IS organizations from the constraints of Microsoft's enslaving technology.

Given such exalted hype it is no surprise that Java is now feeling the backlash from such impossible-to-meet expectations. Its performance has been criticized and its cross-system compatibility questioned. Much has been written about Java's failure as a development environment for client applications. And the growing rift between Microsoft and the Java community is casting a pall over Java's prospects the way the "Unix wars" of the late 1980s stunted the market acceptance of that operating system.

Time for a reality check. How are corporate IT shops implementing Java technology and what kinds of benefits are they realizing?

Will Java ever live up to its early billing or will it be the CASE of the '90s? Conversations with dozens of corporate IS executives provide a clearer picture of Java's current status. Here are some findings:

* Java is clearly a winner as a development language. IT managers report productivity gains by factors of two, four, even ten times compared to other languages, and it has already become the language for writing distributed, network-based applications. One vendor predicts that in just five years only Java, Cobol, and Microsoft's Visual Basic will still be around.

* Corporations are increasingly using Java to build business-critical, server-based software, particularly "self-service" programs that provide employees and customers with access to corporate applications and databases. But Java has yet to win acceptance as the foundation for heavy-duty, high-volume transaction processing systems.

* Adopters are coming to understand the benefits of utilizing Java as a universal integration technology.

* Although Java's performance still leaves something to be desired, virtually everyone contacted for this story considers it just a matter of time before Java matures and those concerns disappear.

* Java's ultimate success hinges on the availability of more robust development tools and application servers, and support from online transaction processing software and other mission-critical systems.

* Some see the "politics" of Java, including the current legal battle between Sun and Microsoft over the latter's Java implementation, as a non-issue, while others feel that such disputes could hinder Java's growth.

All in all, corporate IS seems to be having better luck with Java than the current round of negative press would suggest. "The adoption rate of Java is very high," says Daryl Plummer, Gartner Group research director for Java and Internet application development. "Java is still an immature technology. But it's good enough for 80% of what you want to do."

What Hilton Hotels Corp. wanted to do was build a new front end to its Hilton Info Database, the hotel chain's store of "static" information about each one of its 260 U.S. and 160 international hotels. The database contains information about each hotel such as the size of its ballrooms, the availability of room amenities such as modem connections, and directions to get there. The database -- a Sybase system with Microsoft Access on the front end--is used for hotel operations, sales and marketing tasks, and feeds information to Hilton's Web site.

Hilton used the Java-based Vision Jade development platform from Vision Software Tools Inc. to build a system that lets employees access the database using Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser. The development took about six weeks and the deployment should be complete by early 1999. "The development time is at least a quarter of what we are used to," says Glenn Hellyer, Hilton's director of corporate systems. Faster development time combined with easier deployment could save Hilton as much as $500,000 in IT costs over the next three years, Hellyer estimates.

At the Ohio Dept. of Transportation (DOT), developers built and deployed a Java-based "request for leave" application at one-sixth of what it would have cost had the DOT used a 4GL. One 4GL vendor that the DOT evaluated wanted runtime license fees of $50,000 per 100 users or a half million dollars for the new application's initial 1,000 users, according to John Lavkulich, administrator for application services at the DOT's Division of Information Technology in Columbus. The agency used Inprise Corp.'s JBuilder tool, which does not require runtime modules.

"Java was a bit of a gamble," Lavkulich acknowledges. "So far it looks pretty good." Now the DOT is building more applications in Java, including systems for highway construction testing, project accounting, and heavy hauling permits.